Notre Dame quarterback Everett Golson and the Fighting Irish will are all that stands in the way of the SEC winning its seventh consecutive national title. / Kirby Lee, US Presswire

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

by Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports

ATLANTA -- The Southeastern Conference has accounted for the past six national champions in college football, and no matter which of its schools faces Notre Dame for the crystal trophy Jan. 7, the league will be heavily favored to win its seventh in a row.

In this part of the country, where pride in the conference is universally expressed by simple, yet familiar, chants of "S-E-C, S-E-C," it's almost inconceivable that the Bowl Championship Series national title game could have any other outcome.

"There is a perceived SEC arrogance that I think is very real, and it exists because of all this success," said Bill King, who hosts a daily radio show on college football for Sirius/XM based in Tennessee. "They don't see the outside college football planet like fans do in Big Ten or Big 12 country. I don't think the average SEC fan sees Notre Dame as a worthy opponent."

That earned confidence will be broadcast to the nation Saturday at the Georgia Dome, where the SEC championship game will essentially serve as a national semifinal. The winner between No. 2-ranked Alabama and No. 3 Georgia is virtually assured a spot in the national title game opposite the Fighting Irish in Miami Gardens, Fla.

Notre Dame senior linebacker Manti Te'o dismisses the idea that the team the Irish will face in January has some unique aura - or a lock on the title, for that matter.

"I think we're all going to strap up our pads the same way, strap our chinstraps the same way," the Heisman Trophy contender said Thursday, while acknowledging how dominant the SEC has been.

As recently as Nov. 10 it appeared the SEC's title streak would come to an end when Texas A&M beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa, leaving the league without an undefeated team. At the time, Notre Dame, Kansas State and Oregon all still had perfect records, meaning whoever won the SEC title would need two of those three teams to lose to get back in the race. That's exactly what happened.

Now, regardless of who wins this weekend, fans across the country will be subjected to another five weeks of dialogue about the SEC's dominance and grandeur. And folks around here are happy to oblige.

"That pride has been a part of this conference for a long time," said former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer, who oversaw the 1990s shift from a regional league to a powerful brand whose football product could be seen in every corner of the country. "I can remember going to Final Fours and other events and hearing people chanting 'S-E-C' long before (the national title streak), but it's been enhanced by the success of the past few years. When you have success, there's a tendency to become somewhat confident of your performance, and obviously they've backed it up."

A league apart

Even putting aside the national title streak, the SEC has set itself apart from the rest of the college football universe. From its coaches' salaries to its facilities to its ever-increasing national television exposure, the conference just doesn't let up.

According to USA TODAY Sports' most recent annual analysis, SEC schools account for nine of the 20 largest athletic budgets in the country and seven of the 20 highest-paid coaches. Those investments pay off in recruiting, where 11 of the top 25 teams in Scout.com's rankings for the 2013 class are SEC schools.

"(It's) the commitment they've made, financial support-wise, to be one of the best if not the best," said coach Chris Ault, whose Nevada team plays in the Mountain West. "The Southern teams, football is just a different animal than most places in the country. Not that it isn't important in all other places, but down there it truly is a way of life."

But the aura of dominance has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the gravitas of SEC football appears to give the conference a growing edge each year.

Last season, the BCS formula - influenced largely by human polls, including the USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll - gave Alabama a slight nod over Oklahoma State of the Big 12 for a spot in the national championship game opposite LSU, even though the computer ratings showed that Oklahoma State's schedule was stronger than the Crimson Tide's.

This season, according to Jeff Sagarin's rating, Alabama has played the 39th toughest schedule in the country and Georgia has played the 42nd most difficult. Yet other one-loss teams with similar credentials such as Oregon and Kansas State aren't in the conversation for the national title game.

Not so fast

But not everybody in college football buys the line that the SEC is tops and other conferences are merely also-rans.

"We feel our league (the Pac-12) is as good as anybody in the country," Arizona State coach Todd Graham said. "You can't argue with their personnel and the speed and things the SEC has. It's got to be considered at the top. But is it leaps and bounds above everybody else? I don't think that."

Even so, a quick scan of the top 10 teams in the USA TODAY Sports Coaches' Poll reflects SEC dominance. Six of the 10 teams, in fact. The Pac-12? Oregon (No. 4) and Stanford (No. 9) are represented.

Graham points out, though, that on any given Saturday the Pac-12 is competitive with the SEC: "You look at the teams in our league, week in and week out, we can play with anybody. Oregon can play with anybody."

Indeed, Texas A&M's debut in the SEC might give the conference's foes some fodder. The Aggies had been a middling presence of late in the Big 12, sporting a 33-31 record over the last five years. Upon joining the SEC this year (along with Missouri), Texas A&M had been inundated with preseason questions about whether the school could compete in a league that is supposedly more rugged along the line of scrimmage and faster at the skill positions.

Instead, the SEC had a tough time adjusting to Texas A&M, which is 10-2 behind redshirt freshman quarterback Johnny Manziel and delivered then-No. 1 Alabama its only loss. In the process, the Aggies and their spread offense delivered something of a shock to a league where the vaunted "SEC speed" had been offered as an explanation for the dismantling of the Big Ten's Ohio State in back-to-back national title games, by Florida in 2006 (41-14) and by LSU in 2007 (38-24).

Was Texas A&M's season the product of an exceptional performance by Heisman favorite Manziel - or a sign that the SEC isn't as good as its fans think? Perhaps a bit of both, but until someone takes the crown from the SEC, bragging rights belong to the 70,000-plus fans who will gather this Saturday at the Georgia Dome and the millions of others across the USA.

"Over the last several years, there's been a lot of people with a chance to dispel that myth, but when it comes time to do it, they haven't done it," said former Texas A&M coach R.C. Slocum, who tried to get the school to join the SEC back in the 1990s when the Southwest Conference was crumbling. "No question there are other good teams around the country, but the week-after-week competitiveness of the (SEC) schedule makes (SEC teams) better."

Auburn's pain, SEC's gain

That notion wasn't always widely accepted outside the Southeast. In 2004, Auburn finished 12-0, beating teams that finished sixth (Georgia), 15th (Tennessee) and 16th (LSU) in the final coaches poll - a more impressive résumé than either Alabama or Georgia has compiled this year. But the BCS formula left Auburn at No. 3, matching up unbeaten Southern California and Oklahoma in the national championship game.

That perceived snub of Auburn enraged SEC fans, and the wheels were in motion for a near-decade of dominance. Texas would beat USC for the title the following year - the last time a non-SEC team reigned over college football.

Gary Danielson, a former Purdue and NFL quarterback who has called the top SEC game on CBS since 2006, saw the Auburn snub as a foundational moment for the superiority complex the league now enjoys.

"I covered a lot of football before I got to the SEC, and I thought it was pretty similar everywhere," Danielson said. "But when I came to this conference, I could feel it; they had a big chip on their shoulder that the national media did not look down this way. It was Big Ten, East Coast, and the straw that kind of broke their camel's back was when Auburn didn't make it. (Now) you're getting a bit of a backlash from 20 years of being overlooked."

That is a difficult proposition for the rest of the country, which collectively rolled its eyes last year when Alabama beat LSU 21-0 and registered the third-lowest TV rating for a national championship game in the BCS era. Though the game lacked drama, it was a symptom of SEC fatigue, something King experiences with callers on his radio show.

Meanwhile, the top programs from other elite conferences are either trying to overcome NCAA trouble (Ohio State from the Big Ten is 12-0 but ineligible for the postseason) or struggling to meet their historical standards (Florida State of the Atlantic Coast Conference had hopes of sneaking into the national title picture before getting knocked off by Florida last week).

"It's every other region of America against the SEC now, no question," King said. "But under the current setup ... there's really no end in sight."